Everything Has Changed Page 3

  On the Tuesday afternoon after Wayne told her he was thinking about moving back to the states the couple was in full-blown turmoil.

  Julie happened to be dusting her apartment when her good friends Hans and Elyse stopped by.

  “We’re headed to the centrum to fetch our things,” Elyse told them. “Would you like to go along?”

  What she meant, actually, was that she was going shopping. In traditional German fashion, she walked to the town square every day or two for a handful of groceries. She carried two reusable canvas bags with her and would only purchase enough to fill the bags.

  Then she’d go back a day or two later and repeat the process.

  German cities, you see, aren’t sprawling like most American cities are. They’re compact. They make the best use of space because Germany as a nation is much smaller than the United States.

  They make use of space in other ways as well.

  German kitchens typically don’t have the cupboard space American homes do. The refrigerators are smaller too.

  That goes back to the shopping habits of German fraus. They don’t purchase a cart full of groceries each time they shop. They purchase only what they need for a couple of days, then they go back for more.

  That’s not to say the Germans are any more right or wrong than Americans.

  They’re just different. And it’s not a difference anyone planned for. It just is what it is.

  Germans have different habits than Americans. As do Koreans, the Japanese, middle easterners. Many Americans think Germans are odd for walking to the markets every day or two, simply because such a concept is alien to them.

  But people around the world differ. There simply is no right way or wrong way to do things. Just different ways.

  As for Elyse, she wouldn’t trade her way of shopping for any other in the world.

  For one thing, it enabled her to get out of the house and take in a walk of a kilometer or so from her front door to the centrum, or city’s center. She’d been thin all her life, and considered her frequent walks a key reason.

  For another thing, everything she purchased was fresh. For right next door to the bakerei, or bakery, was the metzgerei, or butcher shop.

  She could purchase fresh breads, cakes and rolls as soon as they came out of the oven.

  She could buy meats slaughtered that very morning, cut to order from flanks hanging in the back of the shop.

  Next door to the butcher was the blumenlauden, or flower shop. There she could purchase flowers picked just that morning and continue another German tradition: the habit of keeping fresh flowers on one’s dinner table to brighten the spirits of diners.

  Elyse had a sweet tooth, and liked stopping at the süßigkeitenladen, or candy shoppe. There she fought to control herself and only buy one of a hundred different delectable treats.

  Occasionally she’d buy two. But she wouldn’t tell Hans.

  Hans, for his part, didn’t like sweets at all and couldn’t understand her obsession for them.

  His tastes leaned more toward Germany’s liquid treasures.

  That was why he seldom went with her when she shopped.

  She typically dropped him off at the edge of the downtown area, at one of Wittlich’s oldest bier halls.

  There he’d sit on a stool with several other old codgers and tell stories and sing songs while he downed two or three glasses of Bitburger Pils, a local brew and his personal favorite.

  When Wayne and Julie flew to Germany in the wake of the Yellowstone eruption, they took on the same habits as their old friends.

  Well, not all of them. But many, including the frequent shopping trips and visits to the bier hall.

  The trips every day or two not only gave the Hamlins a chance to immerse themselves in German culture. It also gave Wayne an hour or so to engage in private conversation with Hans over several beers.

  And it gave Julie a chance to get Elyse’s advice on sometimes very personal matters, out of earshot of Wayne and therefore out of reach of his interference or interruptions.

  Chapter 7

  Julie and Elyse spoke in hushed tones as a butcher named Gustaf sliced four cuts of meat from the flank of a hog the slaughterhouse had delivered to him in the early morning hours.

  As most of Wittlich slept Gustav was wide awake, accepting deliveries and wrapping the previous day’s orders in snow white paper.

  Elyse was a walk-in customer as many of the townspeople were. Many didn’t know what they wanted until they walked through the doors and saw the options spread out in front of them.

  Gustaf certainly didn’t mind his walk-in business, for it was his bread and butter. Yesterday’s call-in orders helped him pay the bills. But it was only the face to face contact with his regular customers which gave him a chance to push the select cuts of meat which padded his income and paid for his extravagant holidays.

  “Guten tag,” he’d said as he came from the back of his shop.

  He then changed to English, recognizing Julie and remembering she struggled with the Deutsch language and was much more comfortable with her native tongue.

  Americans traveling to Deutschland find it relatively easy to communicate.

  For decades English has been a required course in German high schools. So only the very very old and the very young haven’t been exposed to it.

  Between the little bit of German most Americans know, the little bit of English most Germans know, and a whole lot of pointing and hand gestures, communication isn’t difficult at all.

  Still, Gustav knew that going the extra mile to make his customers at ease made it much easier to talk them into the most choice cuts of his meats. To squeeze a few extra euros from them, without making it blatantly obvious he was doing so.

  He looked Julie directly in the eyes and said, “Might I interest you in some very meaty and very tender mutton chops on this fine day, Madame?”

  Germans eat far less beef than Americans. A typical American’s diet might include various forms of beef three or four times a week.

  A German, on the other hand, typically eats more pork and fowl, more lamb, and a tad more fish.

  Julie said, “No thank you, Gustav. I would like some more of the lovely game hens you sold me a couple of weeks ago. They were absolutely delicious, and I’ve been dreaming of having them again.”

  “Of course, Madame. A very wise choice. How many would you like?”

  “Three, please. My husband… well, I’m afraid one wouldn’t fill him up.”

  “I understand,” he said while rubbing his own expansive belly. “I am the same way myself. I will wrap up the three best birds I have for you.”

  He turned to Elyse and switched back to her native language.

  Julie understood pieces of the conversation. She smiled when she heard the word liebling and knew he was flirting with her.

  Elyse’s blushing and shy smile confirmed it.

  German men flirt with women just as much as Italian men, with one major exception.

  They keep their hands to themselves.

  “Hans has had a craving for schwenkbraten,” Elyse told him.

  “Ah, yes. Just one of my specialties,” was the butcher’s response.

  He opened the glass display case and took four tenderized and marinated cuts of pork and placed them on his scale.

  “Ein kilo?”

  “Ja.”

  Julie looked over the other delectable options before her in the display case.

  Back in the states she’d have had the butcher wrap up several types of meat, take it home and put it in the freezer, where some of it would still be sitting six months later.

  Here she was learning to shop and cook for one or two days at a time.

  Outside the metzgerei she’d grab a few fresh vegetables and fruits from a farmer’s horse-drawn wagon. They’d have the pork for dinner tonight and she’d use the leftover meat to make a delectable stew the following night.

  She was starting to like the German way of living.<
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  If she could just get used to the language.

  Their shopping done, and before they retrieved their husbands from the bier hall, the pair sat down beneath a hundred year oak tree on the town’s square. They had little time to themselves, and it was their last chance for small talk before Wayne and Hans started dominating the conversation again.

  “I read an article in a science journal yesterday,” Elyse began. “Have you noticed it’s much dustier here than it once was?”

  “I honestly don’t remember how it used to be,” Julie said. “I mean, this is the first time I’ve lived here and had to do my own dusting. Every time we came before Wayne and I were your guests. Or we were the guests of other friends. This is the first time I’ve ever had to do the dusting myself. I will say, though, that I have to dust every couple of days to keep my place clean.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Elyse said. “It didn’t used to be this bad. I once dusted once a week, every Monday. If we were having guests on the weekend I’d go over it on Friday, but it wasn’t very bad.

  “Now I too have to dust every other day.”

  “Is that what the article was about? That it’s dustier than it used to be?”

  “Yes. It was talking about how the whole world has changed because of the Yellowstone eruption.”

  “The extra dust? It’s related to the eruption?”

  “Yes. They’ve collected samples and tested them at the Berlin Naturwissenschaftliche Universität… the University of Science. It turns out that what’s making our houses dusty is volcanic ash which was blown into the atmosphere, and which is falling a little bit at a time.”

  “Oh, my…”

  “And that’s not the worst of it. The worst part is that they’re predicting the dust will shorten each of our lifetimes by as much as two years.”

  Chapter 8

  “You’re kidding,” Julie said.

  “I’m afraid I’m not. But the news gets worse.”

  “How so?’

  “The article was talking about western Europeans. The closer one gets to ground zero, it said, the worse it will be.”

  Julie was just a little bit stunned, and didn’t want to ask what was obviously the next question.

  But then again, she really had no choice.

  “How about Americans? How will it affect Americans?”

  “The article said it would depend on many factors. Mostly on how fastidious Ameicans were in protecting their lungs. How old they were and whether they were smokers or had existing breathing problems.

  “A healthy American who didn’t smoke and who wore a dust mask any time he was outdoors might die three years sooner than he would if Yellowstone had never erupted,” she said.

  “But that’s on the good end. A smoker who doesn’t wear a mask can expect to die ten years earlier than he would before the eruption.”

  “But they’re doing ash abatement all over the country, Elyse. I’ve seen on the evening news that they’re burying as much of it as possible. They’re even getting creative and using it to make concrete. They’re using a lot of it to make foundations for the new houses that they’re building for evacuees. They’re finding all kinds of ways to get rid of it.

  “That’s just it. They’re getting rid of some of it. The stuff that’s easy to get rid of. But getting rid of it all won’t happen for many years. At least a generation, they’re saying.

  “The problem, they’re saying, is that most of the airborne particles have settled now. But every time they scoop up a bucket full to dump into a dump truck they disturb it again. Every time a dump truck drives down the highway to a processing plant some of it blows off the back of the truck and becomes airborne again. Every time the wind blows through it sends ash particles back into the air.

  “And according to the article, more than half of the ash is in places where they can’t recover it. The deserts and mountains are covered with it. The forests are covered with it. You can’t drive a front end loader through heavy trees to gather it, and you can’t drive a dump truck into remote deserts and mountains to haul it to a processing center. Plus, their primary use for it… making concrete out of it, just doesn’t have enough demand to dispose of it quickly.

  “They’ve done a study and determined that if every foundation for every new house in America was poured with ashcrete it would take two hundred years to get rid of it all.

  “And apparently there’s some backlash about the whole project too. Some builders are balking at the idea of using ashcrete for their foundations.”

  “But why? I thought it was a spectacular idea.”

  “Well, so do I. but there hasn’t been enough testing on it to determine whether it’ll hold up long term. Builders are concerned that it may not be strong enough. That maybe after twenty years the foundations will start cracking. The cracks will start releasing ash dust into the homes. And that the builders will be blamed, and will be sued out of existence. All because they tried to be good Americans and helped get rid of some of the ash.

  “Some builders are predicting that in a generation or two the ashcrete foundations homes are being built on could be worse than the asbestos problem is. That hundreds of thousands of homes could just become uninhabitable.”

  “Elyse, Wayne has been saying he wants to move back to the United States for awhile.”

  This was news to Elyse, who stopped dead in her tracks.

  “But why? Why on earth would he want to go back there, now that you’re in a place that’s relatively safe?”

  “He said he believes the danger isn’t over. That the eruption wasn’t as bad as it should have been, given the amount of magma that was far underground beneath Yellowstone.

  “And the pressure. He said the pressure a thousand feet beneath the earth couldn’t possibly have been relieved by so small an eruption.”

  Elyse was stupefied.

  “Are you kidding me? The eruption vaporized thousands of square miles. I don’t think ‘so small an eruption’ is an adequate description.”

  “That’s just it.

  “Wayne isn’t what he appears to be.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, you and Hans see what I call the “dumbass” side of Wayne. The guy who tells terrible jokes and bumps into everything and who plays the part of the drunken buffoon at cocktail parties.

  “You know he has no mechanical aptitude and couldn’t change a car’s starter if his life depended on it. And that he always seems to say the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

  “Yes, I remember. The first time he met my seventy year old mother he congratulated her on her pregnancy. She went on a diet right after that and lost those pesky twenty pounds.”

  Julie giggled.

  “You remember the first time you invited us to stay in your home several years ago? When the light bulb went out in your guest room?”

  “No. What happened?”

  “Wayne kept trying to unscrew the bulb. He didn’t understand all he had to do was push and turn and it would pop out.

  “The whole time we were here we were stumbling around in the dark, because Wayne was too proud to admit he couldn’t figure out the light bulb. And he forbade me from talking about it also.

  “Finally, the day before we left, he went to Hans hat in hand and admitted the light bulb had outsmarted him. Hans showed him how to remove it. It took about three seconds.”

  “How come Hans never told me about that?”

  “I suspect Wayne was so embarrassed he asked Hans to keep it to himself.

  “Anyway, that’s the side of Wayne we all see and love.

  “But there’s another side that most people never know he has.

  “He’s a brilliant scientist. I know because I’ve been to more award ceremonies than I can count.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. At every one they get up in front of dozens, sometimes hundreds of scientists and academics who go on and on about his accomplishments. They call him the most knowledgeable volcan
ologist in the world. They have him give a speech, which he hates, and they give him plaques and proclamations and honorary degrees and all kinds of stuff to hang on the wall.”

  “How come we never knew this?”

  “Because all Wayne does is throw it all in a box. He hates that part of the business, as he calls it. He hates going to those things and only does it because his university gets recognition. Did you know he was recommended for the Nobel Prize in Science ten years ago?”

  “No. Seriously?”

  “Seriously. He was beaten out by that guy in Belgium who developed a faster way to identify genetic markers or something. But I understand it was very close.”

  “Well, I’ll be… I never knew he was such an accomplished scientist.

  “But wait a minute. What does all of that have to do him wanting to go back to the United States?”

  “Because he wants to inspect the site. Where Yellowstone National Park used to be. He wants to take new readings.”

  “But why, in God’s name, would he want to do that?”

  “Because he’s convinced the first eruption didn’t release the magma pool. It didn’t relieve the deep-earth pressure.

  “He’s convinced it’s going to blow again.”

  Chapter 9

  The chitlins almost always got their way.

  Oh, their mother denied it.

  Their grandparents Rocki and Darrell, who were the ones who started calling them chitlins, denied it too, though they knew better.

  Mom Jenn preferred to call them little monsters, a term which may well have suited them better.

  Especially Autumn, who always held her breath until she turned green when she didn’t get her way.

  And we all know that monsters… real monsters… have green skin, right?

  The Hummer Jenn borrowed from a friend when she heard Rocki was gravely injured performed exactly as advertised.

  It got her and her little monsters quickly to Hays, Kansas, despite the several inches of sometimes slippery and sometimes sticky muck and ash on the roads.